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The automation of U.S. manufacturing—robots replacing people on factory floors—is fueling rising mortality rate among America's working-age adults, according to a new study by researchers at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.
The study, published Feb. 23 in the journal Demography, found evidence of a causal link between automation and increasing mortality, driven largely by increased "deaths of despair," such as suicides and drug overdoses. This is particularly true for males and females aged 45 to 54, according to the study. But researchers also found evidence of increased mortality across multiple age and sex groups from causes as varied as cancer and heart disease.
[...] To understand the role of automation on increased mortality, O'Brien and co-authors Elizabeth F. Blair and Atheendar Venkataramani, both of the University of Pennsylvania, used newly available measures that chart the adoption of automation across U.S. industries and localities between 1993 and 2007. They combined these measures with U.S. death-certificate data over the same time period to estimate the causal effect of automation on the mortality of working age adults at the county level and for specific types of deaths.
According to the study, each new robot per 1,000 workers led to about eight additional deaths per 100,000 males aged 45 to 54 and nearly four additional deaths per 100,000 females in the same age group. The analysis showed that automation caused a substantial increase in suicides among middle-aged men and drug overdose deaths among men of all ages and women aged 20 to 29. Overall, automation could be linked to 12% of the increase in drug overdose mortality among all working-age adults during the study period. The researchers also discovered evidence associating the lost jobs and reduced wages caused by automation with increased homicide, cancer, and cardiovascular disease within specific age-sex groups.
Journal Reference:
O'Brien, Rourke, Bair, Elizabeth F., Venkataramani, Atheendar S.. Death by Robots? Automation and Working-Age Mortality in the United States [open], Demography (DOI: 10.1215/00703370-9774819)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @04:12AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by crafoo on Friday February 25 2022, @04:16AM (10 children)
I don't see their evidence of a causal link. In understand clearly why communists deeply desire to make this link. It supports their ideology. However, I only see correlation, at best, in this study. Disingenuous claim to it's core.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @05:19AM (6 children)
The fatal flaw of Marxism is that it doesn't account for the human instinctual need for social dominance hierarchies. A Butlerian jihad is inevitable.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @02:57PM (5 children)
Violent revolutions tend to install dictatorships. After all in a violent revolution the one who uses violence the most effectively tends to rise to the top. Crudely speaking it's like selecting a leader by "most violence" instead of "most votes". With "most votes" if the voters don't like the leader they can vote differently later on. But with "most violence" the dictator tends to keep retaining the ability of exerting the "most violence".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @05:01PM (3 children)
What a stupid generalization that glosses right over the Republican coup of 2021 in the United States. It is not about underlying ideology but how violent the people choose to be. Also explains your whiny tangent into "Marxism" which is dog whistling by fascists.
Say goodnight pepe.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @05:42PM (1 child)
The Republican coup of 2021?
I think such crazy statements only make the democrats look bad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 26 2022, @09:27AM
If every Communist Revolution were as non-violent...
As the protesters - the overwhelming majority of whom were unarmed - who entered buildings through doors the security held open for them...
Then perhaps Communism would not have acquired its current incel murder fantasy stigma.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 26 2022, @10:04PM
All you Shabbos Goy race-traitors are going to die. RAHOWA!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @11:39PM
In addition to the attempted coup of January 6, 2021, I would recommend studying the history of the French Revolution. The result was a brutal Bonapartist dictatorship and ultimately the restoration of the monarchy.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday February 25 2022, @03:54PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 26 2022, @03:07AM
The Labour Theory of Value is the only thing Marx ever got right, and then only because he cribbed it from Adam Smith. Of course, he only wanted it as a talking point. The rest of his socioeconomic theory is garbage from top to bottom.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday February 25 2022, @07:35PM
Indeed. I see evidence of a link between drugs and the paper's authors, who are surely on crack or meth.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @04:20AM (1 child)
Dismantle the internet. Think of the amazing number of jobs that one act would create!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 25 2022, @03:43PM
Once the internet is dismantled, these people who dismantled it would now be jobless again.
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @04:36AM (9 children)
Due to increased (higher quality?) productivity.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @04:50AM (7 children)
It would have shown up in improved life expectancy but that has been going down for several years in a row now.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @07:22AM
Perhaps increased population density is the cause. Places without automation tend to be poor locations that have reached closer to their carrying capacity a long time ago while places with automation tend to be more developed and less populated earlier onand so their population size has had more room to grow. As population density overall has increased later on places affected most later on are more developed locations with more automation and so their increased population densities have resulted in more problems for various reasons (ie: more stress, more pollution, disease, etc...).
Plus people want to move to more productive locations with more automation which further increases population density.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mcgrew on Friday February 25 2022, @07:40PM (5 children)
Only in America where we lack universal health care. Until the pandemic (a purely time-limited phenomenon) life spans have been rising with automation everywhere else, we're fucking morons here. What causes drug use isn't automation, it's lack of income. Poor people need something to ease the pain of poverty. Oh, and when you have no job in America, you have no health care.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 26 2022, @03:15AM
A lot of people who do have jobs don't have (meaningful) healthcare. The ~50% reduction in effective income over the last forty years certainly hasn't helped things, either, and the inflation spike we're getting due to supply chain issues* and outright gouging in the futures markets is only going to make it worse.
*Keep in mind it wasn't COVID or the lockdowns themselves, but mass layoffs by domestic freight companies that caused the biggest disruption.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 26 2022, @05:25PM
California pretty much does have mandatory healthcare now and it's been going down hill for a while. I don't see universal healthcare really fixing anything. You still have homeless drug addicts all over the place and it's been getting worse and worse the more left it's been getting.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday February 28 2022, @09:32PM (2 children)
Anecdotally, at our local site with maybe 500 employees - we've had 3 suicides in the past 2 years. 3/3 leading cause of death among local employees.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday March 03 2022, @02:36PM (1 child)
Mental health is part of health care. Suicide is a failure of the health care system.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 03 2022, @04:17PM
There's a pretty heavy amount of support available and frequently advertised to the employees - no extra cost, included with basic healthcare plan. That's not typical in the U.S. but it is the case in our company.
Socially, I'm pretty sure all three had been conditioned as children to be "manly men" and not accept, much less ask for, that kind of help.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/06/24/7408365/
(Score: 4, Interesting) by driverless on Friday February 25 2022, @09:27AM
Due to confusing correlation with causation.
In the country where I live, at one point the teenage suicide rate tracked the number of Porsches on the road, or vice versa. So obviously all we needed to do to get the teen suicide rate down was ban Porsches. Or maybe the other way round.
(Score: 2) by oumuamua on Friday February 25 2022, @05:31AM (1 child)
a job you probably didn't like anyway, you might find Warmduscher therapeutic (NSFW but you're fired anyway)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtxlArfnSaI [youtube.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @01:08PM
The issue isn't jobs going away due to automation, most of those suck. The issue is that a bunch of people can't get better ones and there's no provisions being made to ensure they can find meaning or the means of supporting themselves without. A job.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @07:40AM
it's prolly easier to define "mortality" then "automation"?
a device that replaces a human? well you can split up a job into multiple steps.
so a " thing" requires 10 human to make it, but you could also require 100? is that automation if they increase output 20 ..err.. 11 fold?
it is prolly thru that "smart tools" can introduce stress to human workers, so it's prolly best to introduce robots where they can fill a buffer, like a warehouse and/or at the end of a production line after which no human can be stressed?
putting a human directly right after the output of a robot is prolly the idea of a good "robot overlord" (posing as human).
then again this might only be a problem in 'murika ... in other places robots strike if workers die :D
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @12:43PM (4 children)
"Robots" do not cause these problems.
Unemployment causes these problems. Along with wage decline, drug addiction, poor health care, obesity and all the other things that are actually being measured and which are already well established (and obvious) as the cause of health problems.
The paper says they somehow were able to distinguish between the effects of job losses caused by automation and those caused by other factors, but they don't really say how. Nor do I believe that is even possible, regardless of the available data. The time frame of the study is 1993-2007, the peak of the off-shore / outsource shift. Any company that could have adopted automation but didn't would have been forced out of business or would have had to relocate to Mexico or China.
As with all other technological change, eventually new jobs will be created to replace the lost ones. The only real question is how to soften the transition, and how to make sure that the new jobs still pay well (but not so well that the whole thing moves to China anyway).
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @01:13PM
In the past, that was true. But most of the new jobs have been crappy service sector ones that are now being automated via computers at a vastly increased rate. Past developments do not guarantee future ones. Just because in the past new jobs were created does not guarantee new ones.
And it's virtually ensured that the fewest replacement jobs possible will be created do that billionaires can create penis shaped rockets to joyride in fake space rather than anything productive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @02:13PM
Robots don't kill people. People kill people.
Besides, they're not dying becuase of the robots, the robots are just exasperating underlying conditions they have. This is all just a pathetic attempt to make MAGA supporters feel bad.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday February 26 2022, @01:01AM (1 child)
Unemployment doesn't cause these problems, the lack of an income to live on does. If we are going to automate jobs out of existence, we are going to have to provide an income for the former workers to live.
That, and we are going to have to raise people to do fulfilling things with their lives. Too many people simply have no idea what to do with themselves aside from working their crappy job and going home and sacking out in front of the TV or internet or whatever. No job, and they turn to chemical stimulation, anti-social behavior, poor living habits, etc. Actually, that still occurs to people who work crappy jobs, far too many receive an inadequate income for doing so.
I can't say I know how to bring this about, but somehow we must change this to have people live lives that bring them contentment. Whether that contentment comes from programming code, gardening, fishing, writing, building things, whatever, it doesn't matter. It seems to me that far too many people now are unhappy and they can't really define why. Too many get lured to pointing at easy scapegoats for their problems and unhappiness. That of course never solves anything, it just creates more unhappy people. Myself, too much of my spending goes towards the life I want to live, not the life I live, and I am getting perilously close to the point where I better do it or I will die without ever doing so.
It all sounds kind of hippyish of course, but I think Thoreau pointed this out long ago:
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Saturday February 26 2022, @02:12AM
Ideas I put together around 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html [pdfernhout.net]
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society. ..."
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 25 2022, @03:45PM (1 child)
They only want to take our jobs.
(the deaths are merely a side effect)
If you eat an entire cake without cutting it, you technically only had one piece.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @09:44PM
When do I get to fuck the robots, and will it cost less and be less dangerous than my current options?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 25 2022, @06:20PM
The robots are making us fatter!! Nooooo!!!!
Death by fat.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday February 25 2022, @07:25PM
If I could read the article, I would be able to understand if it is as stupid as the abstract indicates.